Meccano...

There are those amongst us who were brought up holding tiny silver spanners in their hands instead of silver spoons in their mouths. We are the Meccano generation; a generation of small boys who built cars, planes, locomotives, and steam engines from exploded drawings printed in incredibly complicated technical instruction booklets that a seasoned engineer – even one that had built the odd bridge or two – might fail to follow.

Despite this we all managed to build working cranes with winding platforms, suspension bridges with operating cantilevers, and fully working Second World War tanks that fired actual shells which exploded on impact… Didn’t we?

Well, I for one didn’t.

My Grandfather once bought me a huge set of ancient Meccano in an auction for five bob. It was most of what must once have been a Meccano cabinet no.10 set, and the boy that had once owned it had probably gone on to build multi-funnelled passenger ships, streamlined cars that beat the land speed record, maybe even the Doodlebugs that landed on London during the Blitz.

Even without the lid and with one drawer missing, my Meccano set was magnificent with all kinds of intriguing cogs, wheels, bases, pinions, joiners, braces, flywheels and dozen on dozen of tiny brass nuts and bolts that I never seemed to have enough of and always managed to cross-thread with that silly bent silver spanner. Yes, it was every budding engineer’s dream.

Thing was I wasn’t budding engineer inclined and, much to my Grandfather’s disappointment (disgust?), all I ever seemed to make were random Babylonesque towers of Meccano scrap, or surreal half-formed Meccano creatures – part wheel / part horse / part sellotape (I never did have enough of those dammed annoying nuts and bolts).

I did once make a car of a kind. Well, when I say car it had four wheels and a box thing that it might have been possible for a driver to sit in, IF only there had been a seat – oh, and a steering wheel.

Then there was my train, well it looked like a train to me.

“What IS that?” My dad asked me when it was finished.

“I call it ‘Man’s eternal struggle for self fulfilment in an age of sceptical neo-realism’.” Six year old me replied. Actually, I just looked sheepish and mumbled that I didn’t know and that it had just came out that way. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that it was a train.

And that’s how it has been ever since. I might set out with a complicated set of plans, some cogs and wheels, tiny brass nuts and bolts and all manner of stuff. I might even have a stupid bent silver spanner, but when it comes down to it, whatever I start out to make usually ends up as something different, something that ‘just came out that way’.

And I’m not just talking Meccano.

Empty - the Devil and all his friends...

We get big skies on the Llyn - big skies, big winds, big rains, big landscapes. The peninsula sticks out into the Irish Sea like a broken leg surrounded by water, not quite an island – and there are giants and giantesses in the mountains. They throw rocks around, littering the landscape with their monoliths and cromlechs. It can be an empty, dangerous place, even more so when the thinking is upon me.

Sometimes, when the thinking is there I cross the lane, climb the step-up stones to the field and stand looking upwards under the big empty sky until its emptiness fills me up. I hate the empty feeling but it’s better, easier, than letting the fullness that threatens to engulf me build - filling me up to bursting, battering inside, demanding itself out. I stand arms outstretched, face upward, buffeted by wind, becoming void.

And, after a while of an age, fullness out and empty in, I walk back across the lane the hollow man.

Ready for sleep, I dream.

I’m at the hill and the moon is bright. The stone doors aren’t where I expected, so I simply walk into the hill through the turf and soil, roots and worms passing through my flesh and on into the chamber in the soul of the hill. They are all there – Arthur, his men, their horses, Merlin, Odo, Simsan and his wife, Maer, my Grandfather at his anvil beating on a long, glowing blade – and in the corner, towards the back, the Devil and all his friends sitting at the table, talking quietly, laughing, dealing, congratulating each other.

I see my Grandfather glance towards me, he shakes his head and continues with his work, heavy hammer falling, falling, falling. I look to Mair, no smile, no tear - she simply turns away towards the sanctity of the wall. The horses snort and spook nervous, ready to run – but where? Arthur and his men, each a statue, look forwards as Odo, Simsan and all the other Giants and Giantesses focus their tearful, bulging eyes towards the earthen ceiling above.

Only Merlin watches as I walk towards the empty chair and take my seat at His table.

His Counter makes the tally, ticking me against his column of souls. They are talking, the Scribe recording the conversation, hot red, in his record. In the shadow behind the Devil, his Talker sucks in each and every word, storing them up for her future use. A single sword is drawn, held high by His champion, the New King, His favourite boy - and then there are the others, the necessary small evils, of which I am only one - but one.

The Devil and all his friends waiting to take my emptiness and fill me again with their thinking and thoughts.

Where, inside this hill, is the big sky now? Where, oh where, am I?

Off the beaten track…

Sometimes we take THAT turning rather than sticking to the main road. It’s always a risk. The roads around out bit of Wales can get very narrow, passing points can be few and far between, and reversing a mile uphill on a twisting, stone-walled, single track road can reduce even the calmest of drivers to a sweating, swearing, heap of jelly.

It can get even hairier when you encounter a tractor and trailer driven by the farmer from hell who refuses to slow, insisting on edging up to within six inches of your bumper whilst blasting his tractor horn and flashing his headlights, hazard lights, fog lights AND indicators whilst revving his noisy, smelly, engine.

Fortunately we didn’t meet him yesterday or that woman in the 4x4 who seems incapable of reversing the six yards into the huge passing place immediately behind her, preferring to shake her head and raise her hands (palms upwards) with a shrug instead. You may know her. She’s the one with the piggy eyes which clearly announce that it is you who are going to have to reverse back along the road to the passing place you vaguely remember seeing ten minutes earlier. After all - what else can she do poor thing?

Answer – a) Get a smaller car. b) Learn to reverse. c) Take a day off from being a bitch. d) All of these.

I have met both of these individuals ‘off the beaten track’ as we euphemistically call the ridiculously winding, undulating, narrow lanes we sometimes decide to take. We once encountered a huge fallen tree on a five-foot wide downhill ski-slope of a track overlooking a twenty foot drop to rocks and rapids on one side and a solid cliff face on the other.

Despite speaking nicely to the tree it refused to move. So on that nightmarish occasion it took me over thirty minutes to reverse the half mile back to the turning point at the top of the hill with Gaynor walking along behind the car instructing me to ‘turn left a bit, turn right a bit, Careful, your back wheel is almost hanging over the edge of the drop. STOP YOU IDIOT, STOP!’

I was twenty years older, six shades of grey lighter and crying tears of relief by the time I reached the sanctuary of that turning point.

‘Never again!’ I always say. But then I see an intriguing little side road and ‘off the beaten track’ we go again.

You see, the thing is you never know what you are going to find off the beaten track. It isn’t all sadistic agricultural workers, sow faced florists, and uncommunicative trees.

By the way did I mention that the bitch in the 4x4 was a florist? She was, and her name was Sheila. Sheila of Sheila’s Flowers and there was a phone number. I called her afterwards from a phone box and pretended to order some flowers dictating a card which read: ‘To Sheila, hoping that you meet a tractor when out driving and reverse your car into a very deep ditch.’ She hung up.

Yesterday, we only met three cars on our eight mile journey ‘off the beaten track’ and on each occasion the other driver stopped and reversed to allow me to pass (nice, nice, chaps). The road was very narrow in places but we could usually see quite a way along it, so Gaynor spotted the massive tipper lorry bombing along towards us long before it was reached us, allowing me plenty of time to pull into a handy farmyard, hide from the lunatic driver, and wait for it to pass.

We ended up deep in woods in a sunlit glade by the river with rocks and waterfalls and swirling water. An old stone bridge hung above an even older ford beneath. It was one of those magical places that you sometimes happen upon.

The road continued the other side of the bridge, but it looked even narrower than the one we’d taken to get there and there was a sign saying ‘PRIVATE – NO FURTHER’. The ford looked pretty deep and the road up from it very steep and slippery so instead of going any further and continuing our adventure off the beaten track we just took a few photos and drove back to the safety and relief of the main road.

Phew! We’d got away with it again.

Spring scribbles...

Spring was in the air today, between the showers.

Blue skies, ponderous white-grey clouds threatening to catch me and my paper with a soaking, grass beginning to stir itself into a lively green and movement everywhere.

It’s the movement that interests me, the movement that I can feel around me but can’t quite see. The movement that is like an extension to the wind, a magnification of the shade and light as it passes over landscape. I feel the movement at the edges of my senses so strong that it should be with capital. Movement.

The Movement is the unseen inner life of the landscape - a sound of insects, the whisper of a breeze, a smell of something rotting on the wet land. It comes to the paper as scribbles in an attempt to catch everything; it’s moving all around.

I know it sounds pretentious or maybe a madness, but it’s what I feel when I’m drawing, the landscape broken down into a series of wiggly moving lines.

So here’s my latest scribble - Across the fields towards the mountains with a stone gatepost in the foreground. Don’t ask me what those dark smears over the field are, I have no idea. I simply felt and heard them as they passed in the air high above me.

Perhaps they’re echoes of bird song.

That poster...

I don’t usually post on a Saturday but I heard on the Radio 4 news yesterday morning that Martin Elliot had died.

Martin who?

Martin Elliot was the dashing thirty-something Wolverhampton Polytechnic photography technician in the late Seventies when I was at college studying first fine art and then design. He was tall with a beard, wore faded 501’s and drove a Volkswagen beetle. At weekends he would drive down to Cornwall to go surfing. He was cool.

His much younger girlfriend, Fiona Butler, was on my design course. She went surfing with him and I used to daydream about her in her wet suit. She was cool as well, cool and sophisticated, very sophisticated for a girl in her very early twenties. She was tall and blonde and very beautiful and she was one of the colouring girls, there were three of them - Fiona, Liz and Jayne. They drew and coloured with pencil crayons, flowers mostly, with great care and very beautiful blends. I was a scribbler by comparison.

One evening, after a few glasses of wine, Fiona told us that she was the girl in that poster. We didn’t believe her at first - how could she be the girl in that poster? That poster? Yes, that poster. That poster, the one I and ALL of my school friends had pinned to their bedroom walls a year or so before, the one that I’d bought out of the NME with a three quid postal order, that poster with the girl in her tennis gear hitching up her dress to show her bare bottom, the one that sold over a million copies for Athena, their best seller ever.

THAT poster.

Martin took the photograph. Fiona was the model. It was a spur of the moment thing, they were about to leave the tennis courts when, seeing the evening sun shining through the trees, Martin had an idea. The rest, as they say, is history.

Imagine what it was like for us testosterone driven male students with Fiona wandering all over college in those ‘so’ tight jeans of hers and knowing EXACTLY what they were covering. After all we’d seen it on our moonlit bathed bedroom walls night after night.

Martin sold the rights to the photograph to Athena for a few hundred quid but, good for him, he kept the copyright.

Martin died in Cornwall, a mildly wealthy man, from cancer yesterday. Fiona married a multi-millionaire businessman years ago and still lives in the Midlands. Between them they created a twentieth century icon and a ‘branded on my brain’ memory in me.

THAT poster.

Tennis anyone?

Misty voodoo...

What’s that in Hisfaults car? Oh yes, that voodoo doll of his. Nasty little thing.

I know all about voodoo, well us cats do, we’re hissing experts at curses. It’s a witch thing. Everyone knows that cats make the best familiars, and as for hexes we are the cat’s whiskers at hexes.

Talking of whiskers – if I could get into the car and get hold of that voodoo doll and then find one of Hisfault’s whiskers, or even a hair would do, I could wrap it around that hissing doll and hex him so that he would… Now what would I hex him to do? Take my collar off? Feed me tinned Salmon? Buy me some pet mouses? Maybe I’d make him go crazy and run around like a headless chicken… no, he does that anyway without the need for voodoo. I know, I’ll make him let me stay out all night rather than making me come indoors.

Now how do I get into this car, I have to get that doll. Wait a hissing minute, I feel a bit funny. What’s wrong with me and why is that doll looking at me like that? I feel all fizzy…fresh fried fishheads don’t tell me I’VE been voodooed.
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Nooooooo not me vooooooodoooooooo! I'm too young and full of life to be a zombie!

Mair...

A funeral today. How many have I attended? Less than two handfuls but I’m sure they’ll begin to come thick and fast soon enough.

Mair (not Mary) our next door neighbour in Wales. Our good, keeping an eye on things, pick up the post, put the bins out, and get Will to cut our hedge, lovely, caring, always ready to have a chat neighbour, Mair. Her passing not expected, not even suspected, so sudden a downhill slide and not old at seventy six.

The funeral beautiful. Service at home in her spotless, immaculate, neat and tidy living room. Closed coffin surrounded by friends dressed in black. An honour to be invited to attend, a ‘private’ affair, close and closest in the way of small communities. Words spoken in Welsh, not understood, but understood, the passing words spoken by the preacher.

Tears.

The postman delivering the post mid-through and I picking up the cards from the carpet to place on the polished sideboard. Then Mair leaving her home of all her life for that last time, wheeled to the waiting hearse followed by a trail of black.

Tears.

The chapel cemetery. Sunshine and mud, a glimpse of the sea, the gulls soaring overhead, husband, son-in-law, grandson and friend lifting the coffin to the greengrocer grass disguised grave. Lowering gently with black ropes and words. Mary Elisabeth Jones on coffin plaque, not Mair after all then.

Tears.

After, tea with sandwiches and barath bread at the Lion. Words spoken gently, kindly, light laughter, remembering.

Smiles.

Mary Elisabeth Jones and always Mair to us - we will miss you.